April 29, 2014: The USC Shoah Foundation Student Association brought Holocaust survivor Celina Biniaz, Cambodian Genocide survivor Sara Pol-Lim, and Rwandan Genocide survivor Edith Umugiraneza together for a panel and Q&A about women in genocide, moderated by USC Shoah Foundation Executive Director Stephen Smith. Syuzanna Petrosyan, a USC graduate student and third-generation descendant of Armenian Genocide survivors, introduced the event.
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After the end of WWII, the Jews in Bohemia were taken care of by the Social Welfare Department of the Council of Jewish Communities. Most of these services were financed by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, also known as the JDC or simply the “Joint”. The work of this American voluntary agency became the main target of attacks once the Communists seized all power in Czechoslovakia in 1948. In 1950 the JDC was expelled, but the need for social work remained.
Renée Firestone is a survivor of the Holocaust and was among our first interviewees. She became a successful fashion designer, as well as a frequent speaker about her experiences during the war in schools, museums and other educational settings.
Located northwest of Drohobycz in the Lwów voivoship in Poland (after the war Drogobych, Ukraine), the Bronica Forest was the site of massacres of the local Jewish population by the Nazis in 1942 -1943. The Jews were taken from the Drohobycz ghetto to the Bronica forest to be killed until the closing of the ghetto in June 1943.
Nearly 11,000 Jews were killed on that site, including Al’fred Shraer’s mother and maternal grandfather. He speaks in Ukrainian about the history of the monument standing on the site and explains how the executions took place.
Jewish Survivor
Malka Baran remembers working with children in a displaced persons' camp and notes that it was this work that helped her resume a normal life after the Holocaust.
Gender: Female
DOB: January 30, 1927
City of Birth: Warsaw (Poland)
Country of Birth: Poland
Ghettos: Czestochowa (Poland : Ghetto)
Went into hiding: No
Other experiences: displaced persons camps
Barbara Reichmann survived the Holocaust by going into hiding and concealing her identity. In order to survive, she volunteered to work as a Polish forced laborer, which brought her eventually to Ulm, Germany. She was liberated by French armed forces. In Munich, she met her husband, Leon Reichmann, and had a daughter. They eventually emigrated to the United States.
With a focus on our first-ever podcast, We Share The Same Sky, join us for a conversation of the digital impacts of testimony, featuring We Share the Same Sky producer Rachael Cerrotti.
Jewish Holocaust Survivor
Interview language: French
Incarcerated in the forced labor camp of Wolanów, Poland, Chana worked in the kitchen of the men’s camp. It’s from this place that she witnessed a German killing the companion of a woman she knew. She reflects on the initial images of horror witnessed in the camp, and remembers them as those that shook her the most.
Simon Drucker was born in 1924 in Paris, France, in a Jewish family of Polish origin. His parents, Abraham and Thérèse, left Poland in 1921. Simon had a younger
brother, Isidore. Engaged in the French Foreign Legion during the outbreak of the war, Abraham was arrested in June 1942 and deported first to Pithiviers, and later to Auschwitz, where he was murdered.